U.S. mobile operator AT&T said on Monday it was not planning to take over Britain's Vodafone, making its intentions clear after a request from the takeover panel following months of speculation.

The statement to the London Stock Exchange rules out the second-largest mobile service provider in the United States from buying Vodafone (Newbury, UK) for the next six months. However the group can still make an offer if Vodafone's board agrees to it, or if a third party enters the fray.

Ericsson, the world's biggest telecom network equipment maker, and Samsung Electronics Co have reached a deal to end all patent-related legal disputes.

Ericsson (Stockholm, Sweden) said on Monday the agreement included an initial payment and royalty payments from Samsung (Seoul, South Korea) for the term of the multi-year license agreement and would affect Ericsson's operating cash flow at the beginning of 2014.

UK fixed-line incumbent BT has unveiled plans to spend another £50 million ($82.6 million) on extending fiber broadband services to homes and businesses over the next three years.

In a statement, the operator said the extra investment would benefit more than 30 cities in the UK and more than 400,000 additional premises.

It will mainly focus on equipping city cabinets that were not part of BT’s (London, UK) original plans, deploying fiber to cabinets that serve apartment blocks and laying additional fiber to new build sites in cities.

Saudi Arabia's Mobily will start leasing its mobile phone network to a new operator to launch a rival service in the first quarter, an executive said, kicking off the biggest shake-up in the kingdom's telecommunications market in six years.

The Saudi telecom regulator, in a move to increase competition, has required the three mobile operators - second-biggest Mobily (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), leader Saudi Telecom Co (STC) (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) and Zain Saudi (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) - to provide wholesale capacity to new operators that have no networks of their own.

Ericsson has secured another customer for its Device Connection Platform in the shape of Sri Lankan mobile operator Dialog Axiata.

The Swedish vendor claims the technology will give Dialog (Colombo, Sri Lanka) everything it needs to deploy and manage millions of M2M connections.

The largest mobile operator in Sri Lanka, Dialog becomes the first of the country’s players to launch an M2M platform amid growing regional demand for M2M services, and currently serves customers in the utilities, finance, telematics and transport sectors.

UK-based M2M player Neul has launched a new connectivity platform for Internet of Things services based on the use of so-called white space – gaps between spectrum bands freed up in the transition from analog to digital broadcasting.

The company is one of the main backers of the Weightless standard that has been developed to support M2M communications over white space.

UK-based NextG-Com has launched what it claims is the first LTE protocol stack targeting M2M and special applications.

Its ALPs 520 is described as a customizable LTE modem stack that will meet the needs of target niche and special markets such as M2M services, LTE backhaul, relay nodes, routers and gateways.

The technology is suited to a range of M2M applications, says NextG-Com (Staines upon Thames, UK), from low-memory and low-cost M2M applications to high-performance special applications, with or without mobility.

Middle Eastern asset-tracking player Solve IT has launched a range of new products and services based on a platform developed by Concirrus, which specializes in cloud-based M2M software.

Using “template solutions” for asset, vehicle and personnel management, the company has introduced a range of asset security solutions to Middle Eastern markets, where it serves customers in the construction, facilities management, and fleet and logistics areas.

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